Keeping Marriage Spicy With Jane Austen

When friends and colleagues heard that I was reporting on the eccentric world of Jane Austen superfans, one question was uppermost: Do people hook up at Jane Austen camp? At first, I grew irritated at these inquiries, which seemed to assume that Austen cosplay is somehow centrally about sex. (It’s not, really; it’s mainly about books, and only a little about sex.) Still, as I spent more and more time in the world of the Janeites, I came to meet quite a few older couples for whom the Jane Austen summer campdoubled as a romantic getaway—a chance to rediscover the pleasures of flirting with one’s spouse.

Some, in the tradition of R.W. Chapman and Katharine Metcalfe, had fallen in love with each other in part through discovering a mutual lovefor Austen, and there are various academic power couples across the world whose unions owe their beginning to an indiscreet moment at an Austen conference; as Kipling’s narrator says in his 1924 short story “The Janeites,” Austen remains a “bit of a match-maker” even in death, and at the larger conferences I occasionally met a child conceived (the parents told me) with the aid of Austen’s prose as aphrodisiac.

Ted Scheinman is a writer and scholar whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Slate, and a variety of other periodicals. He is based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine.